ctest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture,
anything which might bear a particular relation to their own
condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal
constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we
judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all
great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil
in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of
the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense
and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct
with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great
writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less
poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the
substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than
accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true
poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful,
true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the
faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of
Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in
their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the
republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were
not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal
advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life,
to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal
dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it
out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
_quia carent vate sacro_. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
harmony.

At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
anarchy and darkness, but that, there were found poets among the
authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
conceived; which,